2009-08-27 – Fedora Test Day – Dracut

This week’s Fedora Test Day will focus on exercising the Fedora 12 mkinitrd/nash replacement … drumroll … Dracut. If you find yourself wondering, "what the heck is that?" The following snippet from the fedoraproject wiki best describes the change.

With Dracut, the initramfs has one purpose in life – getting the rootfs mounted so that we can transition to the real rootfs. This is all driven by device availability. Therefore, instead of scripts hard-coded to do various things, we depend on udev to create device nodes for us and then when we have the rootfs’s device node, we mount and carry on.

It is worth noting that dracut will impact every Fedora 12 user (and potentially users of other distros). As a result, there are several ways to get involved with testing, ranging from basic to more advanced:

I invite you to join #fedora-test-day this Thursday, August 27 2009 to help test dracut. At the very least, providing feedback on the live image will be much appreciated. Additional test feedback per the wikiguidelines is also encouraged.